I find the game is a lot more enjoyable if I can jump on my tank alt when my raid buddies need a tank for something. I might be squishier, and I might contribute less damage to the group, but I can at least do the job I am there for: holding aggro off of the rest of the party. I did not find it particularly fun in Burning Crusade when my presence in a dungeon was effectively a wasted spot because there was no way my Tier4 geared tank could hold aggro from the warlock in Sunwell gear. I don't think the warlock found it especially fun either when his options were "stand there for 15 seconds before you can fight" or "die horribly."

I just don't think that's in any way valid reason to remove threat. Blizzard didn't design the dungeons for groups with Sunwell geared DPS and T4 tanks, it's not going to be the experience they designed no matter if there's threat or no threat, so it doesn't make sense to use it as an argument here. You might have liked that, but many people would like to one-shot heroic bosses, but that doesn't mean it would be a sensible mechanic to let them.

Yes, if you pull threat, you might die. But my statement was about pulling threat not being a risk if your tank was skilled and similarly geared to the DPS in the party.

That's again simply incorrect. If you had dps nuking different targets, there's no tank that could hold threat (except paladin in T5+ gear). DPS could burst over tank threat in many cases, and tanks would have to take time off the main target to do aoe threat.

Threat was certainly a lot more of an issue then than it was not, but we didn't spend every second obsessing over the threat meter.

It's not about obsessing over threat meters, it's about more depth in group play. It's things like knowing what the tank is main targeting, knowing when there's enough threat on the secondary targets to pop your cleave or aoe, knowing that a mob might make a run for a healer and the tank will need help to stop it, knowing which part of the fight you should save your threat drop for and knowing if there's a situation where it become optimal to add a threat reduction ability in your rotation etc. etc. Today none of that matters, DPS can nuke whatever they want, AOE whenever they want, nothing will ever go for healers, etc. etc. Group experience is just dull.

It was a very important part of the gameplay, and it's existence made sense from a fantasy RPG standpoint. You have a dragon archetype and the classic group of adventurers. The dragon goes for the healer because otherwise it would be impossible to defeat them. While he's going for the healer, the tank taunts him, attacks his ego and starts damaging the beast, which is infuriated by the brash display of arrogance and is enraged then attacks the tank.(remember that dragons and other powerful creatures are old and strong and guard the treasure, which the adventurers want ) While all of that is happening, the dragon is still aware that there are more than two enemies present, that there are also guys/girls with big swords/bows and powerful spells and the like attacking him, and if they hit it too hard, he is going to prioritize THEM instead of the cocky guy clad in steel armor and wielding a shield because he's not that effective in hurting him when compared to them.

This is a key point to me and Wrath started the trend away from this model. I'd love to go back in some form, but we never will.

That wasn't really the case though, if a boss hit a dps warrior it would 1shot him all the same as a rogue.

I'm not saying it was perfect, just saying that it's not a fundamentally broken design. Further, not everything needs to be balanced around boss fights. For example, paladins were great trash tanks in MH, but not much good on bosses. The same way it would be perfectly valid, and in my opinion a much more interesting design, to have warriors good at one thing (e.g., trash or add damage) while rogues being good at boss damage (or whatever).

Well then, how about we take out every mechanic that makes raiding a chore and then everyone will be happy right? Everyone obviously doesn't want anything to make raiding require just a little more management to complete so what's point, we here at Blizzard have heard the players, raiding will require less management and because bosses have to much health we're going to tune their health down to 10k. We don't want you guys having 9 minute boss fights, we think 10 seconds will be more appropriate.

Well then, how about we take out every mechanic that makes raiding a chore and then everyone will be happy right? Everyone obviously doesn't want anything to make raiding require just a little more management to complete so what's point, we here at Blizzard have heard the players, raiding will require less management and because bosses have to much health we're going to tune their health down to 10k. We don't want you guys having 9 minute boss fights, we think 10 seconds will be more appropriate.

Yes, because the removal of one specific thing which obviously a good portion of the community didn't find compelling for gameplay is the equivalent of making raid bosses that fall over instantly and shower you with epics for just looking at them sideways.

No one here is asking for boss fights to last ten seconds and have no mechanics, so let's keep the ridiculous hyperbole out of the conversation and stick to discussing the statements people are actually making.

Yes, because the removal of one specific thing which obviously a good portion of the community didn't find compelling for gameplay is the equivalent of making raid bosses that fall over instantly and shower you with epics for just looking at them sideways.

No one here is asking for boss fights to last ten seconds and have no mechanics, so let's keep the ridiculous hyperbole out of the conversation and stick to discussing the statements people are actually making.

I was making a point through sarcasm much like I was on my most recent infraction regarding "dicks, pussies, and assholes" (Team America reference by the way, hope you enjoyed my ban appeal). If you think I was fully being serious then I'm expecting to much from you or anyone else who did. Anyways enjoy being ultra-literal.

Also the point of my previous post is that it's not good to take out to many mechanics because eventually it does in a minor way dumb the game down a bit. Threat management is a minor change they made a while back, they've made a couple more "QoL" (ugh hate that term) changes such as seeing exactly where a boss will throw something indicated by a circle of some sort.

- - - Updated - - -

Another thing they really shouldn't have done (it literally makes no sense in hindsight at least) is making each tier pointless after a new patch comes out. In fact it leaves more content for people to keep going up a ladder of progression even if they never see the end, if I never saw the last tier of raiding in BC I'd just watch it on Youtube anyways. Not a mechanic but another obvious point where Blizzard blundered and it's funny as of recently they are starting to realize many of their mistakes and are reverting them (somewhat) such as making LFR a bit more obsolete.

Anyways threat management? Made raiding just a little bit harder (not really) but you had to keep your eyes on Omen at least, much like map awareness in LoL, keep checking that minimap.

For me it was never a matter of like or dislike as dps - it just was. But I played two classes with excessive threat - resto druid and warlock - and it could be really annoying. I remember begging paladins for blessing of salvation because without it, I could basically not play. Then soulshatter came and threat became a button I pressed at start burst and somewhere halfway in the fight during cooldowns. When bosses had a threat reset I waited.

That was it - that was threat for DPS, in a raid environment. Not particularly interesting.

However, with no tanks around, threat was actually really fun. Distracting shots, Searing Pain, all that stuff to keep your friends alive and while you took the damage and they got their cooldowns for traps or whatever back up they'd try and take the threat back from you. I liked that.

And as a tank - for me threat was what made it really fun. It sucked that gear mattered so much in threat generation so when I was undergeared I was going to have it rough. But then the entire party would cooperate to make it work anyway and I don't know, it was an extra element. Even when geared, overaggro happened and trying to save the group to the best of my ability was really awesome.

It's always been a poor mechanic carried over from other games. With hard enrage timers and mandatory DPS checks it actually hinders the game. It's one thing when you have a 50 min enrage and everyone can slow down while the undergeared tank retains threat. But when you have 6 min enrages where DPS can't hold back then it's no longer fun for anyone.

I like the tank swapping mechanic as it forces your tanks to not AFK but if anyone remembers Flame Buffet, Death Touching and other mechanics that dropped tank's threat to 0 you'd remember how god damn awful it was. Everyone make sure all 4 tanks are #1, 2, 3 and 4 on the KLH threat meter! Damnit I crit 3 times in a row and pulled aggro during the tank swap. Firemaw just breathed on the raid...

I'm not saying it was perfect, just saying that it's not a fundamentally broken design. Further, not everything needs to be balanced around boss fights. For example, paladins were great trash tanks in MH, but not much good on bosses. The same way it would be perfectly valid, and in my opinion a much more interesting design, to have warriors good at one thing (e.g., trash or add damage) while rogues being good at boss damage (or whatever).

Well I just spent the last few pages in the TBC thread about how Paladins were great boss tanks, and were used very widespread as a guilds offtank. Since bosses needed more than one tank it was common to have a Paladin tank as your second tank on a boss. A Paladin was quite capable of main tanking pretty much every boss fight in the game and was only at a real disadvantage in a few situations.

So that's not really a valid point. Threat was a big issue for DPS Warriors in TBC, in Sunwell the tuning was so tight that Fury Warriors often had to do less dps than rogues, not because the class was not strong enough but because they had to throttle dps to avoid overagro, on fights that were tuned so hard that you couldn't really afford to have people throttling their dps!

Regarding Pala Tanks - on AOE packs a Paladin Tank outclassed the others by a long way and were really strong choices for certain roles on certain fights (including KT and Illidan). And though Warrior/Druid had advantages on certain fights, so too did the Paladin. If you were fighting Archimonde then you wanted a Warrior for berserker rage, and you couldn't use a Druid on Illidan due to his shear ability, but then a Druid was much prefered on Brutallus due to superior dps/threat... Just as a Paladin was a massive bonus on Kael'thas due to AOE damage/threat for the weapons phase.

Well I just spent the last few pages in the TBC thread about how Paladins were great boss tanks, and were used very widespread as a guilds offtank. Since bosses needed more than one tank it was common to have a Paladin tank as your second tank on a boss. A Paladin was quite capable of main tanking pretty much every boss fight in the game and was only at a real disadvantage in a few situations.

Depends how you define "quite capable". I'm sure it can be done, I just wouldn't have picked that over warriors. We ran with a main warrior tank, and one warrior and one paladin offtank. The reason for gearing a paladin offtank was MH trash, but IIRC we mostly ended up using the warrior offtank on most bosses that needed two tanks.

Anyway, that's really besides the point. What I'm getting at is that it's a perfectly valid game design to have different tank classes with different specializations, like paladins being great at tanking trash/adds and other tanks being great at tanking bosses.

You're talking out your arse. The game was already designed to be casual to begin with since release date. It was just casual gameplay executed poorly that gave the illusion of having difficulty. All Blizzard are doing are sticking with their mindset that this is, was, and always will be, a casual game.